Month: April 2016

Can I Ask My Cleaner To Chop Wood?

What will a cleaner do in my home? What can I ask them to do? And What Won’t A Cleaner Do?

The wonderful Mary-Mary (she’s so good we named her twice!) working hard for Mrs Mopp 🙂

Cleaning businesses come in many shapes and sizes. There are sole traders who work alone, there are cleaning businesses who employ staff members, cleaning agencies who use self-employed cleaners, and cleaning franchises, that are part of a larger National or International cleaning brand/company.

There is a cleaning service out there for everybody and every home, and one that will meet your cleaning requirements, household needs, and budget.

What does a cleaner do?

Generally, cleaners will all undertake the following cleaning tasks and duties during a domestic clean:

High and low-level dusting

Cleaning of bathrooms

Cleaning of kitchen

Vacuuming

Mopping

Dusting and polishing of shelves, picture frames, units etc.

Some cleaners will also offer the following:

Change bedding

Empty all internal bins, including main kitchen waste

Ironing

Washing of dishes/loading of dishwashers

What other things is it okay to ask a cleaner to do?

This will depend on the type of cleaning service you use and the relationship you hold with them. Generally, it is okay and within limits, to ask the following:

Polishing silver or brass

Cleaning of internal windows

Washing and special care cleaning of ornaments

To fold washing and put it away

Help you de-clutter

Tidy up an area

Please note that you may be charged for additional time for extra tasks, or you may have to forfeit areas of your regular cleaning schedule if you are adding extra tasks to the list for your cleaner to do (remember they are only human!)

Some cleaners don’t wash up or iron, as standard, or even if asked, as it is not listed in their service list. It is always best to enquire, via telephone or email, as to what the cleaning service does offer, and what extras they would be willing to do. Before you invite a cleaner to your home to quote, make sure your needs will be met and your time not wasted

Below is an example of a cleaning franchise who does not iron or wash dishes, and makes it clear to clients.

A screenshot from the website of world’s largest cleaning franchise, Molly Maid, showing what they do not clean

Things Cleaners Don’t and Won’t Do (and shouldn’t be doing)

Walk your dog *

Look after your children *

Do your supermarket shopping *

Chop wood for your fire place * (Really!)

Sew holes or darn socks *

Clean your whole home or a large area on their hands and knees *

Unblock your toilet *

Be naked or in something skimpy * (that’s a whole other service, my friends!

* = Tasks that a member of my cleaning team, or I, have been asked to do by a client! Yes really. (And yes our Moppettes chopped up the logs that day, as they were out of mobile reception to call the office, and didn’t want to let the new client down!)

As A General Rule, Moppettes Don’t Chop Wood 😉

Next Steps

The first thing to do is look online and search different domestic cleaning services in your local area – take a look at their website, their Facebook, their Twitter and various other social platforms for starters, to get a ‘feel’ for them.

Do they look and sound like a person/business/franchise you could use?

Do they have a clear brand and service offering?

Do they cater for all the cleaning wants and needs you may have?

Do they testimonials and client interaction?

When getting to quoting stage, ask specifically if the cleaner will do X or Y as cleaning tasks, and be open and honest about your expectations

1 in 3 homes hires a cleaner. Are you missing out on something?

Twice as many people under 35 now hire a cleaner. No longer is home-help just for the rich and wealthy.

According to the Daily Mail, 1 in 3 homes now hires a cleaner, or other home help like gardeners or window cleaners, on a regular basis, to help them maintain their home, their gardens, and sometimes even their lives!

According to the Daily Mail, 1 in 3 homes now hires a cleaner

Leading this trend of hiring a cleaner is the under 35’s who, according to 1 in 4 of them, see housework as “boring” and, quite frankly there are just more important things these millennials would like to be doing… y’know, like living life!

Why is the trend to hire a cleaner increasing?

People today are busy. Busy with careers, busy with children, busy with trying to see family and friends regularly, busy trying to fit in exercise, busy trying to fit in a hobby. Busy.

We live in a 24-hour-a-day society, who even has the time to clean the bath and remove the cobwebs anymore, nevermind the time consuming and laborious task of cleaning skirting boards and paintwork regularly, among many other regular home cleaning jobs to be done?

We are the time poor generation, with too much to do and not enough time to fit it all in. Millennials and people who value their time, would rather use their downtime time for their pleasure, rather than scrubbing, and they are willing to pay for someone to do it for them, as they see it as a good trade-off of money for time, it’s that simple.

Interestingly, one of the ways I have always motivated my staff, at Mrs Mopp, is by telling them that they are time fairies – and I fully believe it to be true!

I once had a conversation with a Moppette who said that what she does for a living doesn’t really add anything to the world or make a difference! I had to stop her there… I believe cleaners make a difference!

I said to the cleaner that if it were not for her, the couple, whose house she cleaned on a weekly basis, who are both full-time professional people, would not have the precious time available at weekends to spend with their children, they could not enjoy their family days out, and they could not all spend quality time all together.

I explained, as their cleaner, she was a time fairy and with the swish of her duster she delivered time to that family to be together every week and what a wonderful gift that is to leave in the world…

Beyond the wonderful time-saving reason for getting a cleaner, another reason people hire a cleaner is because it is just not as expensive as you think it is!

** Now, before we go further, I am not talking about cheap, unregistered, uninsured, cash-in-hand cleaners here, I’m talking about tax-paying, fully insured, trained cleaning professionals who are HMRC known individuals, cleaning businesses, cleaning agencies or part of a cleaning franchise… Cheap, cash paid cleaners are a whole other blog post, that I will cover another time, but suffice to say that good labour isn’t cheap and cheap labour isn’t good! **

So, back to your money…

Would you be happy to sacrifice a takeaway meal a week or a chocolate and wine fix, to have your home cleaned from top to bottom once a week, so that when you get home all you had to do was relax?

How about instead of spending the average of £540 a year, that a family typically spends of cleaning products, you invest it into a cleaning business that will not only supply all cleaning products but, they do all the actual cleaning too? Sounds like a no-brainer right?

The cost of a weekly cleaner will cost from £20 – £30 per week depending on the type of service you choose to use, so ask yourself when you next tuck into a pizza if you would swap it to have your bathroom sparkling and your floors clear and clean and the whole of Saturday to yourself?

So if you’ve always wanted to learn guitar, or visit friends more often, or even if you just want to sit and do nothing but relax with your evenings and weekends, it might be time to hire a cleaner and free up some of your valuable time as life really is too short…

Take a look at our other posts on “What Type Of Cleaning Services Are Available” that will walk you through the differences between sole traders, cleaning businesses, cleaning agencies and cleaning franchises, and the pros and cons of them all.

If you are thinking about the move to hire a cleaner take a look at our post “What To Look For In A Cleaner” – this post will take you through where and how to find a cleaner, and things you should know about them before you hire them.

Next week we talk about What To Expect From Your Cleaner, so be back here next Wednesday, bookmark us/add to RSS or come follow us on Twitter or ‘Like” us on Facebook to never miss a post!

When hiring a domestic cleaner, what service levels should you expect in your home?

As we discussed last week, having a maid service is no longer just for the rich elite, it is now so common to hire a cleaning service that 1 in 3 homes in the UK now employs one!

As the more “ordinary” folk move to hiring help within their homes, some of them may have never had dealt with a cleaner before and perhaps come from a background that has never had cleaners or hired help in their homes – this post is to guide newbie homeowners employing a cleaner on a few things to expect.

A Cleaner Will Not Redecorate Your Home

Excuse the dramatics but we wanted to make a point. Some clients expect their house will be transformed almost instantly upon having a cleaner and while that is true to a point, (as yes your home should look, feel and smell cleaner when you come home after each and every clean) it may take several cleans to get your home to the desired and workable standard of the cleaner and of the cleaning service provider you have hired.

It may take a cleaner 2/3 cleans to “bed-in” to a new client’s home and to know the flow of the rooms and work out the most efficient way of achieving all tasks in the set time frame. It will take several cleans to get on top of all paintwork and internal windows, for example, especially if they have not been regularly maintained beforehand. It may take several treatments to cut through all limescale on a shower screen or on taps if the build up is heavy etc.

A cleaner is only human and can only achieve so much in a 2, 3, 4-hour time span. From experience, our domestic Moppettes are professionally trained in cleaning techniques for efficiency combined with high-standard cleaning, and yes they can clean better and faster than the average Jo, but there is a limit to how many bathrooms can be cleaned, how many bed changes can be done or how many flights of stairs vacuumed in a two hour time slot – this is true of all cleaners

How To Overcome This?

The very best thing you can do is be very clear of your cleaning wants and your cleaning needs when you have someone come to your home to quote. The cleaner and the cleaning company want to serve you well and would much rather deliver great cleaning work in 2 hours than provide lots of bits of shoddy, rushed work throughout the home. If you can only afford to budget for 2 hours a week of cleaning then be realistic on what the most important tasks are to you to be done.

If you can afford it, have a deep/spring clean before your regular cleaning service starts – some franchises will insist on this – A deep clean will clean all paint work, internal windows, and there will be a deep clean in the living areas, kitchen and bathrooms etc. The idea of having a deep clean prior to your regular service is that it will make the home easier to maintain moving forward.

A Cleaner Cleans But Does Not Tidy Up!

Okay, not strictly true because if we needed to vacuum a floor and it was littered with a weeks worth of clothes, we would, of course, pick up said clothes and fold them neatly… then we could get on with our job of cleaning.

Us picking up your clothes, picking up toys, putting away books and magazines etc is a waste of your actual cleaning time – If we only have 3 hours to do a top to bottom clean on a home and your cleaner spends 30 mins picking up and putting away items, something else may have to be missed, or it will be done in a rush (and probably poorly), as your cleaner will run out of time before they have to move to their next job.

You don’t want a half complete clean, the cleaning business owner does not want to give you an incomplete clean and the cleaner does not want to feel like they are failing as they become so overwhelmed with the tasks to be done Vs time allowed.

How To Overcome This?

The night before your scheduled clean please tidy-up for your cleaner – Get the whole household involved and explain to one and all that floors should be clear and items that should be somewhere should be put there – Your cleaner will love you for it and you will get more bang for your buck in cleaning time. Hurrah all round!

Your Cleaner Won’t Last Forever

Nothing lasts forever we all know this but allow me to explain…

There are two types of cleaner. The first type of cleaner is the dream cleaner for you to hire in your home; they are the type of cleaner that instinctively knows what is to be cleaned, they love to clean and to get quality results, and they would never, ever dream of assigning their name to bad work. Career cleaners live to clean, it is their vocation. This type of cleaner does exist, I promise, but they are rare (in eight years of running Mrs Mopp I have employed several career cleaners and many are still with me, as a good cleaner is worth their weight in gold!)

The second type of cleaner is a person that sees cleaning hours as convenient for their own life and they see it as a job they can do until they find something else. (‘Something better’, is the phrase I will hear most often, frustratingly, cleaning is not a respected job role in this country, and this does not help with retention) These types of cleaners are the majority in the UK. Harsh but true. This is not to say ‘jobbing cleaners’ can’t be good cleaners, not at all, I’ve employed many an excellent cleaner that has gone on to do other things as their circumstances have changed, the point is that these cleaners are not career cleaners, they do not live for the finish and sparkle in the same way as cleaning type number one does and no matter what pay rates, incentive schemes, employee benefits etc that a cleaning business may offer, some people never intend on staying in a role with a long term view (please believe me I’ve tried to change this view and still try daily) and so it goes, your cleaner will not last forever.

Another reason cleaners don’t last forever is that the work is very physically demanding and some people join the profession thinking they can do it (how hard can cleaning be right?) and then they discover after a week or two that it’s really not for them and they can’t stay with the pace

Cleaning businesses HATE changing cleaning staff just as much as a client hates having to have a new cleaner, but please know that sometimes they can’t help it as it may beyond their control, BUT, they will be doing everything they can behind the scenes to correct it, I guarantee it, no cleaning business owner likes disgruntled calls or emails. Not a single one.

How To Overcome This?

When looking for a cleaning business ask about how they do their recruitment, ask what capacity they employ their cleaners – some cleaning business are actually agencies and all their staff are self-employed and none of the cleaners are known to each other – ask how they keep and motivate their staff

Ask yourself would you prefer a single cleaner or are you happy for a team of two to come to your home? Many companies use two cleaners for heath and safety reasons (moving furniture, falling etc) and this can help with service disruption as there is always one known cleaner.

If you really want one person and one person only, you either have to accept, there may be times that particular individual is sick or perhaps on holiday and you would have to go without a clean, or you will have a cover cleaner so as not to disrupt your cleaning service – or if you employ a sole trader cleaner, if they are sick or on holiday you will not have a clean (nor the option of cover).

The main point to take away from the post is this: be realistic with timeframes available, and with your cleaning wants and your cleaning needs. Stay open in communication with the cleaner, supervisor and/or business owner/manager to work together to find your perfect cleaning service.

It can be done, you can have a harmonious relationship with your cleaning provider, with a perfectly running cleaning schedule, I promise. It just won’t happen all in one clean.

Do you have anything to add to this post? Please post in the comments and please share this post with anyone you think may find it useful